Tongue-tied

THE DUCHESS: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

--Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

That's it. I'm tongue-tied. Speechless. Rendered mute by this nightmare that not only continues without end, but actually gets worse each day.

From ThinkProgress (all gut-wrenchingly outraged emphasis mine):

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow returned to the job this morning and hit the ground running. In his first interview with CBS's Early Show, Snow declared that the White House never tried to link Iraq and September 11...

Transcript:

Q. The message is clear - the administration was not straight with Americans, not about W.M.D.'S, not about 9/11. There it is from the former C.I.A. Chief. Is it time for the administration to come clean, Tony?

TONY SNOW: Wait a minute, Chris. The president has been saying exactly that all along. I don't know what the headline is. As a matter of fact, I can remember right after September 11 sitting here when I was a journalist and some of your colleagues, I believe Charlie Gibson may have been there at the time as well. The fact is the president made it clear before the State of the Union in 2002 that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and September 11. So I'm afraid what's happened there is that George Tenet may have been referring to something that has been misreported or at least twisted by people with political motives, but there has been no attempt to try to link Saddam to September 11.

And this unbelievable assertion apparently went wholly unchallenged! I'd scream, if I thought screaming would help any more.

Maybe Tony's right, though. Maybe - in anticipation of just such an acusation from their critics - the incredibly prescient parsers at the White House really were uber-careful to stress only an "ideological alliance" between al Qaeda and Iraq, stopping short of legally implicating Baghdad in the attack itself.

Maybe these masters of obfuscation simply relied on the traumatized and sheep-like populace to make that conflation for itself - a logical assumption, given that loyal Bushies were repeating "Saddam" and "9/11" in the same sentence at EVERY opportunity. (Pay particular attention to the quotes by both Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in those links.)

And maybe Tony has a point that this widely held opinion was "something that has been misreported or at least twisted by people with political motives" - chief among them, his former employer and colleagues at FAUX News. But, by God, this "misperception" certainly worked to the White House's advantage in launching their little Mid-East adventure, didn't it - and the Bush Administration has done little or nothing to genuinely try and set the country straight since then.

Until today. of course.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here."